As Turkey finally decided to invade Syria, it's worth noting some context here:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Four or so years ago, Assad started shelling Turkish villages and Ankara wanted a major NATO intervention in the Syrian Civil War.

https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/185-general/51962-turkish-mps-back-military-action-in-syria.html

At the time when the war's aftermath only blew up brown Muslim people, NATO in its esteemed wisdom decided that terrorist acts and outright state provocation by the Assad regime weren't worth a single shell or dollar or drop of blood on behalf of NATO. Turkey was told to go fuck itself and to find some other way to handle Assad.

http://www.e-ir.info/2012/10/11/turkey-the-balance-of-power-and-the-risks-of-article-v/

^Again, the esteemed wisdom of the international leadership at the time was that the Syrian Civil War wasn't any of their business so they didn't give a fuck what happened in Syria.

Of course we all know what happened following the refugee attacks and the Paris terrorist attack. Suddenly, with unprecedented fervor, France decided that Turkish cities might be blown up and this was not a NATO or a French matter, but if a French soccer game was attacked, well, all of a sudden Syria was worth a bomb or two:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/11/france-syria-iraq-isis/416013/

So, in other words, if it was Turkish lives, that wasn't worth a major intervention. Bringing home what Ankara was dealing with four years prior to France, well....now, NOW Syria was worth the major intervention and multi-sided posturing contest it has become.

Is Turkey favoring Daesh? Yes. After all, when Turkey wanted foreign intervention the first time the rest of Europe decided NATO stops west of Ukraine.

As after all Ukraine is finding out very personally that the esteemed powers of Europe aren't really that concerned to lift a single finger to help them, either.

The Kurds, of course, do all the lovely and charming methods of Hamas to secure nationalist enclaves carved out by leaving mutilated and burned and blown-up bodies in their wake. As most states do, Ankara naturally decides this is inappropriate. Showing a remarkable tolerance never extended by the UK to the IRA, by Spain to the ETA, by France to Communist and Catalan and other nationalists, by Gerrmany to the Red Army Front, or what have you, the EU states naturally decide that what would never remotely be accepted on their soil is perfectly acceptable on Turkey's.

Equally Erdogan sees an opportunity to emerge as a full-fledged theoconservative dictator reverting Turkey in some ways to pre-Ataturk means with modern firepower at its disposal.

Does Turkey's intervention amount to anything more than oppressing a long-oppressed group denied its rights still further? Yes. At the end of the day, the USA and the EU must decide if they intend NATO and anti-terrorist rhetoric to mean anything, or if Turkey, which is clearly degenerating into the worst excesses of the region it's in, should have a free hand to engage in wholesale imperialism using anti-terrorism as a cover.

Then again too it's a bit late to decide that particular barn door should be locked after 2003 blew it wide open and carried off the whole farm with it. The real victims here will remain the long-suffering people of Syria who've seen their country halved and turned into a latter-day variant of 1930s Spain with Great Powers fighting over the twitching corpse purely to prove a point.

Comments

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

Is Turkey favoring Daesh? Yes.

But you still wonder why they aren't being accepted with open arms by Europe?